He did not win his argument, but defeat gave him far more happiness than could have come from victory. Leaving her that night, he closed his hand over her delicate fingers in a clasp which left her smiling in wonder after he had gone. She watched horse and rider disappear into the whiteness of the new winter till both were lost to her sight.

"Bless the boy," she murmured then. "Bless the boy!" And to Caleb, her brother, when he came stamping in: "I surely must take a hand with these children. They have been left to their own devices long enough."

Caleb had recovered his good-natured view of the whole affair; he was given to grinning those days at her flutterings. On more than one occasion he told her, none too flatteringly, that she made him think of an officious hen with a brood which a high rate of mortality and prowling night-raiders had left bereft of all save two of her hatch.

But this particular witticism did not bother her in the least, perhaps because she realized how pat the comparison was. Instead of silencing him she showed him the letter which she constructed some days later--constructed most painstakingly, the second week in December.

She deigned to read it aloud to him, before she dispatched it on its journey.

"Barbara, dear child," she wrote, "this is the appeal of a lonesome spinster lady who finds that winter, still only a l.u.s.ty infant here, is the season for younger, warmer pulses. I am very tired of Caleb's continued company; that is, with nothing to leaven it. The keenest of epigrammarians, my dear, becomes very commonplace, you know, to ears too long tuned to one voice. So I am writing you in dignified desperation to come to me this holiday season--Caleb is not always as epigrammatic as I could wish.

"I am going to be positive that you will come, unless you have already made other plans. And, on second thought, if you have already done so, I am going to fall back upon the privileged tyranny of one who once carried you in her arms. You must come to me this Christmas!"

There was another whole paragraph of rambling, repeated arguments, and then a full page devoted to the beauties of the hills and season.

"The days are diamond brilliant," she wrote, "and the nights as drily cold and crisp as Caleb's few last cherished bottles of champagne. We have a foot of snow, two feet in the ell of the house where the mint-bed lies, and that has afforded Caleb much peace of mind, too.

The roots will live nicely under their warm blanket, you see--all of which must read frivolously to you, coming from staid Miss Sarah. I can only plead that already I must be less lonely for antic.i.p.ation of your arrival. Are you well? You will find new roses for your cheeks in this climate. And you may telegraph your acceptance, this once, if you are too busy to write, although you know I deplore the lack of those punctillios which once made of all custom and etiquette a most charming thing."

It was signed, "Yours, my dear, Sarah Hunter."

There was a quaint twist to the letter S; sharp angles in the chirography which a newer decade of femininity might have found sadly lacking in a largeness of loops now indispensable as indication of "character." And there was a postscript, of course.

"Stephen O'Mara has been several times to dinner, since your departure.

He is working very hard, but most successfully, I am sure, for he appears to be very happy. He is thinner than he was, but who could have guessed that the boy he was would grow to be such a handsome man!

Men with eyes like his and such voices used to break the hearts of susceptible maids, when I was sixteen. Do come! S. H."

She read it aloud from beginning to end, nor did she falter much when Caleb greeted the postscript with a shout of joy. Caleb was most high-spirited those days, for the line in regard to the progress of Steve's work was in truth an under-statement if anything, even though the a.s.surance of his happiness might have been called a misconstruance of facts. Caleb had almost begun to think that he had done Dexter Allison, his friend, an injustice. He had begun to congratulate himself on having said nothing to him directly.

"What do you think of it?" his sister asked pleasantly, when she had finished reading. "Will it--do?"

"If you mean--will it fetch her, I can only say Heaven knows!" Indeed he was enjoying himself. "You feel positive that she cares for him, you say? . . . But I thought you were always inclined to believe Steve rather easy to look at, even as a boy?"

"I was!" maintained Miss Sarah. Her voice grew girlish. "Do you remember the night you gave him my old hunting coat, Cal, and he went to sleep with it in his arms?"

Some of the teasing note left her brother's voice.

"Then why do you tell Barbara--why do you seem to infer--" he foundered hopelessly.

"Stupid!" said Miss Sarah. "Will she come?"

"She won't!" he stated solidly.

When he spoke in that tone Miss Sarah always chose to believe the contrary, and events in this instance proved her right. Barbara did not wire. She wrote a long letter full of little twists and turns which led at last to the subject which Miss Sarah had mentioned so parenthetically.

"I am delighted at the prospect of getting away from town for a week,"

she closed as she had opened her reply--"delighted at Mr. O'Mara's splendid success. Last night I overheard father telling some business a.s.sociates that he would one day be the biggest power in the north country, unless something happened to check him soon. That was very flattering, wasn't it? It will make you very proud, I know. Tell Mr.

O'Mara I wished to be recalled to him. As I have already warned you in this letter, father insists on coming with me. I think he must be a little tired of the city himself, for he is very restless. And remind Uncle Cal that I am to have the wish-bone, or I will not come at all!"

This reply Miss Sarah also read aloud to her brother, in a voice that was not quite Christian, however, for it was gloating in tone.

"There!" she breathed, "and, Cal, aren't you ashamed sometimes to have your judgment so often refuted by a mere woman?"

Caleb had been reading in the Morrison Standard that the East Coast Company had made unbelievable strides in its work, in spite of many conspiring hard-luck circ.u.mstances; he was frowning over that oddly veiled compliment of Allison's, which his daughter had so innocently repeated, but he was glad to hear that Dexter, too, planned to run up for the year-end. He was a bit bored himself. Now he grinned over another thought.

"She fails to mention whether she ever noticed the color of his eyes,"

he choked a little, "or--or the heart-breaking quality of his voice!

Maybe she hasn't noticed 'em yet herself, eh?"

Miss Sarah scorned to answer. She went upstairs to her desk and she wrote two letters that night, before she retired. One went back to Barbara. The other had not so far to travel, but it was longer in reaching its destination.

CHAPTER XX

BLUE FLANNEL AND CORDUROY

The world was snow-bound--all that small world which lay between the hills in the valley at Thirty-Mile. For two days it had been snowing, great flakes so plume-like that they seemed almost artificial, making one think of the blizzards which originate high in theatre-flies under the sovereignty of a stage-hand who sweats at his task of controlling the elements. For two days it snowed so heavily that all work moved but intermittently at the up-river camp; and then, two days before Christmas, the mercury dropped sharply into the bulbs and the weather cleared.

Stephen O'Mara, standing at a window of his cabin late in the afternoon, peering out upon that cold white world, was wondering if she would have found it as wonderful as it seemed to him at that moment; he was wondering whether he would have to break a fresh trail himself, upon snow-shoes, if he were to join Fat Joe and Garry in town for the holiday, when a team of horses came toiling into view far across the snow. It was Big Louie, sitting huge and stolid upon his load of supplies, coming in a whole day late and cracking his long lash over the glossy backs of the bays which the lash was never allowed to touch.

Behind him another sledge appeared in turn, with two figures on the seat, but even at that distance they looked neither so huge nor so stolidly reconciled to the bite of the wind. Fallon was driving; Shayne was beating his arms across his chest. And the second team was f.a.gged and caked with frozen lather. Big Louie had been breaking trail for twelve bitterly hard hours, but his animals were still far from spent--not so tired in fact but what they could throw forward their heads and nicker at the sight of warm stables. Big Louie loved horses as he loved nothing else in his whole dull world. Sober he fed them bits of sugar, with strange throat-sounds which they must have understood, it seemed; drunk he threatened the life of any man who might chance to maltreat them. That was the reason Steve had made Big Louie his head-teamster only two weeks before.

From his window he watched the heavy loads crawl up to the store-house door; he watched the drivers throw tarpaulins over the boxes and knew that they were too weary to unload that night. And he was still there at the frosted pane when the three men, Big Louie still plowing ahead, hove into view again from the direction of the stables and came straight toward his own shack. He opened the door and bade them enter before they had had a chance to knock. The swagger in the shoulders of two of them told him what to expect. Big Louie was only clumsy, as usual.

"You did well to make it," he told the latter, kindly, as he always addressed him. His nod to the others, who reeked of white whiskey, was in part a question, in no wise a welcome. "Well?" he asked.

Apparently there had been a conference beforehand, for there was no hesitancy on the part of Fallon, who had been ordained spokesman.

"We've come for our time," he growled.

Steve nodded gravely.

"I see," he murmured. "May I ask what's your grievance, this time."

They were the satellites of Harrigan. Because of that he had kept them all where his eyes could find them at times. And even though their arch-leader in discontent had not crossed his path in many days he listened now to an echo of Harrigan's activities.

"They're offering three a day in the Reserve camps." Fallon should not have gloated. "Three a day and a bonus for the high week cut. We're going back to the river."

"I see," again observed Steve. "Are they guaranteeing this wage for as long as you want to work."

Apparently they had decided, too, that there should be no bargaining.